When I was in high school, I used to amuse myself by multiplying four digit numbers in my head. It was a point of pride that I had memorized all of my friends’ phone numbers. I even worked out my own (possibly incorrect) version of the Doomsday rule (no, no, of course there was no […]
You’ve seen this before, perhaps even lived it. A new person starts at the company, and from day one, she’s on fire. Everything she touches turns to gold: her projects magically complete ahead of schedule, she’s able to pull the thread on long-standing intractable problems until they’re worked out, everyone enjoys working with her, and […]
Learning a language is hard. In addition to grappling with a new grammar, bizarre pronunciations, unfamiliar vocabulary, and in some cases an alien writing system, you also have to build an entirely new set of skills. Chief among these is the ability to memorize massive amounts of completely random data. No matter how smart you […]
When I was in high school, I once told a friend, in a fit of idealistic follow-your-dreams zeal, that if I ever ended up going to business school, he should punch me in the face. Of course, I had no idea what business school was really about, and as I’ve learned more about how things […]
Paradigms matter. The Pythagorans killed the discoverer of irrational numbers because they didn’t fit within their world view. The Romans had a numerical system that was actively antagonistic to arithmetic, and made no significant mathematical discoveries. The Arabs, on the other hand, had much the same numerical writing system as we use today, developed the […]
A couple of years back, one of my team members wrote a job that caused load on one of our live site databases to spike. When the problem was traced back to him, he laughed, looked into it, and fixed the problem. OK, no biggie, everyone makes mistakes, we knew not to do that again […]
Procrastination is triage with a machete and a blindfold. Hackers are min-maxers. Python is the programming language equivalent of juggling one ball. In order to exceed expectations, you first have to meet expectations. The bottom always eats the top. You have to be nice before you can be mean. With very few exceptions, every single […]
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill I get asked a lot by non-technical people why it’s so hard to find good technical talent. How it is that we can do so many interviews, yet make so few […]
Hackers are cool. Described and celebrated by luminaries such as Eric Raymond and Paul Graham, they’re the self-styled “rock stars” and “ninjas” of the industry. Indeed, who wouldn’t want to be the next Wozniak, Torvalds, Carmack? Who wouldn’t give their right shift key for entry into The Guild? Hackers are min-maxers – working late into […]
As I make plans to purchase a new iPhone next week, and think back over the vast graveyard of computers and consumer electronics that stretches out behind me, I’m put in mind of the evanescence of most of the items I use in daily life. And yet, there are things, like the Mars rovers, that […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 